Thursday, 25 September 2014

St. Dominic and The Lives of the Brethren

The figure of Saint Dominic was one that inspired a legion of followers throughout the ages.

The Black and White habit of his Order clothed Saints Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Albert the Great and Pius V, to name but a few.

Fr. Henri Lacordaire brings to us an introduction to the life of his own spiritual father, and does so with the simplicity and erudition of a true Friar Preacher.

Fr. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire was perhaps the most well-known Dominican in France in the nineteenth century. It was he who greatly aided the restoration of the Dominican Order in a country that had destroyed all trace of it in the throes of the Revolution. he was a great preacher, but also a man of liberal ideas - a penitent sinner but an impenitent liberal as he called himself.This biography of Saint Dominic was a tribute by the great preacher to the Father of all Friars Preachers. It is not a long tome, but rather a simple book designed to introduce the figure of Saint Dominic to the faithful of his day.A liberal in politics, he did not allow this liberalism to destroy his faith in the great saint that was such a foe of heresy and such a lover of the Truth and the Blessed Saviour.This book deserves to be found again by a world in which Liberalism finally decayed into Modernism and a denial of the supernatural.